Pages

July 11, 2012

My Attempt at Batik

I mentioned to a friend of mine that is a teacher that I was looking for some fun art projects to do with the kids at work. She mentioned that she does art projects from That Artist Woman with her class, and the next day I went to check her out. I tried out her glue batik -- what's batik? -- art project to do with the kids. Obviously, some things she does are too old for the age group of the children I work with, but she has such fantastic ideas!

There are several parts to this project. The first part uses washable glue -- preferably of the clear or blue variety -- and cotton fabric.

Make a pattern -- or anything you like, really -- on the fabric with the glue, and let it dry. This would be Day 1 of the project with my kids at work.

Part two of the project requires you to paint the fabric over the glue. Regular acrylic paint works perfectly fine, so there's no need to go out and purchase special fabric paint.

This is the part that I messed up. I just painted the fabric with the paint straight from the bottle, but it is best to water it down so that it goes on the fabric more like a dye, and it doesn't make the fabric all stiff. Also, I had no wax paper, so I had to use aluminum foil -- the fabric came off of it quite easily though.

Day Three -- or part three -- of the project is where you submerge the entire piece of fabric in water to get all of the glue off. As you can see, the glue is clearly washable -- but the paint is not. I did have to kind of scrape at the glue with my finger nails, but it came off with virtually no problems at all.

Once the fabric is dry -- so part four of the project -- you can do whatever you like with it. That Artist Woman made them into pillows and windsocks. My fabric was too stiff to make a pillow -- because I didn't water down the paint -- so I made a windsock instead. I folded the top of the fabric over a piece of string and glued it down -- I had a variety of items...like a hammer...holding it in place while it was drying.

The end product is a lovely windsock that I must remember not to leave outside because, as I have learned, the glue really is water soluble :)